In a notable departure from established practice, the U.S. Senate
endorsed disclosure of the national intelligence budget total and
rejected an attempt to preserve absolute budget secrecy.

As part of the pending intelligence reform bill, the Senate voted
55-37 to require annual disclosure of the total budget request,
the total amount authorized and the total amount appropriated for
national intelligence (not purely military or tactical
intelligence) beginning in fiscal year 2006, when intelligence
funds will be directly appropriated to the new National
Intelligence Director.

Opponents said the move would mean nothing less than the
destruction of U.S. intelligence.

"I have drawn the conclusion that basically this destroys the
[intelligence] network," said Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont). "And
we wonder why we do not have human resources on the ground in
some areas in the world and, yes, even in our own country. I will
tell you, if this [budget information] is disclosed, this will be
one of the main reasons that we will have."

That is incorrect, supporters said.

"The idea that our enemies can somehow determine something about
our intelligence capability by knowing the total of what we spend
is simply not accurate," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).
"Year-to-year changes in any specific program will not move the
overall total number enough to give an adversary any indication
of how that money is being spent."

Significantly, the budget disclosure proposal was supported by 18
Republicans. The last time the matter came to a vote in the
Senate (June 19, 1997), it won only one Republican vote, from
former intelligence committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter.

See the October 4 Senate debate and vote on intelligence budget
disclosure here:

While a Senate majority has now endorsed regular annual budget
disclosure, the CIA and the Justice Department Office of
Information and Privacy continue to hold the strange view that
even 50 year old intelligence budget figures must not be
released.

ENERGY DEPT INCREASES INTELLIGENCE BUDGET SECRECY

The 9/11 Commission unanimously recommended that intelligence
budget secrecy should be reduced and that individual intelligence
agency budget totals should be disclosed annually.

But the Department of Energy has decided to do exactly the
opposite of what the Commission recommended.

Up to now, the DOE Office of Intelligence has been one of the 15
members of the U.S. intelligence community whose budget is
unclassified. (The State Department's Intelligence and Research
Bureau is another.)

No longer. Instead of serving as an example for other agencies,
DOE has decided to classify its intelligence budget, as if the
9/11 Commission had never existed. For the first time in
decades, DOE is withholding all substantive information about its
intelligence program. More than that, DOE is attempting
(improperly) to retroactively classify budget information that it
has previously declassified and published.

Why? "The word came down from [Deputy Director of Intelligence]
McLaughlin that all budget information was to be treated as
classified," according to one official.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, DOE released
a heavily redacted version of its 2005 intelligence budget
request. That document, as well the last several years of
uncensored DOE intelligence budget requests, may be found here:

A four-volume account of the history and evolution of U.S.
counterintelligence that was prepared for the now-defunct
National Counterintelligence Center (NACIC) is now available in
the public domain.

The encyclopedic 1500 page work begins with an account of
counterintelligence (CI) from the American Revolution to World
War II (volume 1), proceeds with a study of CI in World War II
(volume 2), continues with a survey of the post-WWII atom bomb
spies up to the latest espionage cases (volume 3), and concludes
with a look at current counterintelligence challenges from China,
Russia and elsewhere (volume 4).

The study, prepared over several years by multiple authors, deals
in part with well-trodden ground such as the Venona intercepts.
But it also includes extended treatments of much more obscure
topics, such as counterintelligence in the Civil War, and
official accounts of numerous individual espionage cases that
never made headlines, as well as a U.S. government perspective on
"counterintelligence in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s."

For its own peculiar reasons, the Central Intelligence Agency
refused to provide a copy of the document under the Freedom of
Information Act. But NACIC's successor, the National
Counterintelligence Executive, agreed to release it.

See all four volumes of "A Counterintelligence Reader" edited by
Frank J. Rafalko here: